Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

The former senior sous chef at Rick Stein’s Seafood restaurant in Padstow is moving to west Cornwall to oversee the dining room at the Old Coastguard, on the seafront in Mousehole. Jamie Porter has been appointed to his first head chef role at the 15-bedroom hotel restaurant, which hangs on the hilly entrance to the […]

The owners of Primeaur, Westerns Laundry, and Jolene, David Gingell and Jeremie Cometto, are opening a restaurant in Cornwall. Fitzroy will launch in the cute harbour town of Fowey in June and will, apparently, make use of the finest Cornish seafood, with “a cooking style in keeping with their [Gingell and Cometto] ethos, led by […]

Chef Jamie Coleman has joined the Beach at Bude, a boutique hotel on the north coast of Cornwall. The chef has ventured west from the Michelin-starred Masons Arms in Devon. There, reviews have been steadily strong – “lovely and laid back” with “fantastic dishes” are recent comments. Cornwall, then, will likely suit Coleman. The Beach […]

Paul and Emma Ainsworth have bought the lease of the Mariners pub in Rock, Cornwall. It follows the departure of Nathan Outlaw, who left last month. Outlaw is busy planning his new seafood restaurant at The Goring. Not that the Ainsworths aren’t busy. The news of their Mariners venture comes not long after the announcement […]

Paul and Emma Ainsworth, together with their head chef John Walton, are to open a cookery school and chef’s table. Called Mahé, the island in the Seychelles where Paul’s parents met, the school will launch in May this year next to No.6 in Padstow, Cornwall. An announcement said the school and chef’s table will look […]

Nathan Outlaw is to leave the Mariners pub restaurant in Rock, Cornwall, after five years. It comes a month after the announcement he had parted ways with his high-profile, six-year billing at The Capital hotel in London. As we reported just two weeks ago, the chef has just been named as the head of a […]

Establishment favourite, The Goring – just behind Buck Pal, its dining room is one of the few restaurants to have fed The Queen; and the hotel itself was where the Middleton sisters shimmied into their respective dresses on the day Kate married Wills – is to open its first new restaurant at the hotel since […]

Chef David Gingell and restaurateur Jeremie Cometto-Lingenheim are due to open their fourth restaurant in summer 2019. The pair, who are behind north London hits Primeur and Westerns Laundry, as well as Jolene, a bakery in Newington Green, shared their latest project on Instagram with an image saying simply, “Cornwall”. “Summer 2019 sees us opening […]

Fera at Claridge’s chef Dan Cox is swapping the Big Smoke for something a little bit more down to earth – an organic farm in Cornwall. The former executive chef of Simon Rogan’s research kitchen Aulis announced his plans to open a restaurant at Crocadon Farm in St Mellion via Instagram this week. “The day […]

â¦¿ The Observer’s Jay Rayner reviewed Tandoor Chop House, an Indian “concept” restaurant off the Strand, where he found the quality of the food was mixed and the prices high. “The best dish is the Dexter ‘dripping’ keema naan, a charred flatbread piled with highly spiced minced beef. Black pepper chicken tikka brings sizable cuts of bird […]